That's not a fair comparison. You either disallow tabs, or you disallow spaces. A mismatch isn't either, so it doesn't evidence either being better than the other.

Disallowing spaces isn't an option, you can't align code using tabs. You have to both disallow spaces and enforce a no-alignment (leading-indent-only) formatting style.

Just use spaces! You can't mess it up. ;)

Meticulously lining code up like ASCII art seems like an antipattern to me nowadays. It might make some regions of the code look a little bit nicer, but it's never really strictly necessary and it comes at the cost of higher maintenance - for example, add to that list of assignments with lined up equals signs and you have to make your addition line up too, and if your variable name is longer than the longest one in the list so far you have to move all the previous ones over.

> Just use spaces! You can't mess it up. ;)

Oh how I envy someone who can say that.

Then just run an autoformatter over the whole codebase once and clean up anything that looks wrong as you come across it later.

Seems to work OK for the Linux kernel, and the tooling is not onerous -- just run checkpatch.pl on your commits before pushing them upstream.

The kernel has an official & mandatory rule to enforce tabs, at a length of exactly 8 spaces per tab. Anything that doesn't respect that will be rejected without mercy.